Book review: The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

Published on Friday 2 July 2010 15:48

THE IMMORTAL LIFE OF HENRIETTA LACKS BY Rebecca Skloot Macmillan, 352pp, £18.99

HENRIETTA Lacks is one of the great heroines of modern medicine. But while the central figure in Rebecca Skloot's first book helped save countless lives, no hospitals are named after her. She was never given awards. And some scientists still remember her contribution only as an abbreviation - HeLa - the name given to the world's first "immortal" cell line, taken from Henrietta in 1951 before she died from cervical cancer.

Before Henrietta, researchers had found it impossible to keep human cells alive outside the body. But the slice of tissue cut from her tumour was different: its cells multiplied rapidly. HeLa became the ultimate research tool, sent around the world, spawning a multi-billion-dollar industry. Her cells have been into space, been exposed to massive doses of radiation and helped to create a polio vaccine.

But the woman from whom they were taken was largely forgotten. As scientist Robert Stevenson tells Skloot: "Scientists don't like to think of HeLa cells as being little bits of Henrietta because it's much easier to do science when you disassociate your materials from the people they come from." More troublingly, Henrietta never gave consent for her cells to be removed. And for 22 years her family didn't even know their mother had gained this Petri dish immortality.

Skloot tries to restore Henrietta's humanity. Researching her book also acts as catharsis for Henrietta's family, especially her younger daughter Deborah, who has been tormented by what happened to her mother.

A poor African-American woman from Baltimore, Henrietta died in a "coloured" ward, at 31. She is described as a warm, woman with painted red nails who loved to dance. Even before her cancer diagnosis, life was difficult: she had a philandering husband and one of her five children, Elsie, was sent to the Hospital for the Negro Insane.

The racial politics of the medical world is a theme which pervades the book. While Henrietta's cells were being taken, white doctors were performing horrifying experiments on black patients. And the sense of injustice carries into the modern day.

As her son Lawrence asks: "She's the most important person in the world and her family lives in poverty. If our mother is so important to science, why can't we get health insurance?" A science writer, Skloot skilfully explains the medical and ethical dimensions but is less impressive linguistically, her language occasionally slipping into the banal: "No one had to tell us something awful happened at Crownsville - we could feel it in the walls."

Skloot's big mistake is to cast herself as one of the heroines of the piece. Her detective work is impressive but she could have let it speak for itself, instead of imposing herself on the narrative. Skloot should be applauded for giving recognition to Henrietta's enormous, accidental gift. It's just a shame that she had to muscle in on the story.